Useless war icons

The human race is incapable of telling the difference between good and evil because in every war the self righteous bigotry on both sides is supported by a corporate sense of identity with being the 'winner'.
After the British dropped one of the largest tonnage of bombs on a single city Dresden Feb 1945 during a two day bomb fest the bodies of innocent men, women and children piled high in the streets in the days that followed were absorbed into the consciousness of British People as 'the casualties of war'. 30,00 people were wiped out as a result of the bombing raids, which today is the moral equivalence to Israel wiping out Beirut.
Kevin hits the nail firmly on the head, suggesting as I believe he does, that the human race is simply not kitted out with sufficient intelligence to know why there should be a clear understanding of the most basic and fundamental difference between good and evil. This frightening ignorance, in spite of the growth of knoweldge, is all the more demonstrated by our teaching establishments that churn out a boring, repetitive dialectic about creating heaven on earth without having a single clue how to equip the body politic with anything practical that resolves the contradiction of 'killing for the common good'.
Take a hard look at the icons we worship in our nation and you won't have to go very far to see how our institutions maintain a worship of war and destruction as a method of preserving our identity as 'British' by reminding us of the blood spilt by our forefathers in their killing fields.
The human race is so hopelessly conditioned by a belief in its own collective righteousness that condones evil that heaven WILL never be within its grasp, not this millenium, nor the ones following.
We have a combination of war memorials, war shrines, war museums, pride marches, war art, war iconography, celebratory war literature, badges, caps, symbols, war institutions, remembrance services, religious and secular indoctrination of the idea that 'war is a necessary evil' - as one Bishop wrote to me recently. All engineered and maintained by so called 'intelligent' 'academics' who take the noble responsibility of protecting our national identity, commonality and culture through education and the arts. All this upholding of our values and standards through the idolatrous use of symbolic icons like the Cenotaph - a memorial to barefaced evil - is where evil seeps into the subconscious of the national psyche from cradle to the grave.
The idea that some priests in Germany were praying for the sons and daughters of a nation fighting a noble cause in the war against Britain and priests in Britain where praying for the sons and daughters of a nation fighting a noble cause against Germany fills the air we breath today with despair and hopelessness. For, each nation condoned the social practices of its various component parts, whether in the role of priest or of local councillor, and each were talking and praying to a 'common good'. If this is rational, then God help the universe if we ever get to colonise the stars!
Kevin went part of the way but I go further and say we must smash all our uselss icons that appraise heroes and irradicate them from our history books and our memorabilia and teach our children to despise the concept of training fellow human beings to become murderers on our behalf.
We should disband all armed services and destroy every single weapon right down to the very last dreg of historic weapon preserved in castlemania.
Until then, stop griping about war. It's here to stay because we preserve it in our culture.